One day, Google believes, software developers will love its "non-existent" Android handset just as much as they love the iPhone - and maybe more.
Speaking this morning at eComm, a conference dedicated to "emerging communications," Google mobile platforms guru Rich Miner acknowledged that for the moment, Apple may have an …

COMMENTS

That sounds a bit too optimistic

Thinking this through more:

"My belief is that any startup company or company that’s trying to build a popular mobile app will build it for both platforms".

Android is Java ONLY.

iPhone is compiled code only, Java does not run. Regardless of various fantasies people have about how it *may* be possible to get Java running on it, it doesn't here and now, nor will it actually seem to be more than hot air until its shown to work.

So, is a *startup company* or *company* going to develop their mobile applications in two completely different versions, based upon two completely different design approaches and implementations?

Hmmm, only the *most* lucrative (at best). That's an expensive and extremely-hard-to-maintain way to do things with any degree of success.

Certainly not an approach to be taken by budget focused (startup) companies, nor apps with a large existing code base.

If it was that easy then Symbian and Microsoft would already have a single platform but due to the range of devices including screen sizes, types of input it just doesn't happen no matter how much they promise to deliver a converged platform in the next release.

Java already won on mobiles.

Java is on all the Nokia phones, all the Moto, Samsung and on the Windows Mobile phones. And its at the core of Blackberry. And it's what mobile devs know. Adobe's flash lite is going away, and Google trying to fork Java just relegates them to the trash heap. What an arrogant bunch of jerks.

Apple ignoring Java or competitive runtimes? The problem for them is there's not enough volume in sub-10m unit volumes for a developer to make any money. $1/download - 30% to Apple doesn't even recoup development costs. Great phone, just don't know how a dev makes money if they're not also on Nokia and Samsung.

Re: Java already won on mobiles.

Agreed, Google is just forking java binaries, making them incompatible for no obvious reason (other than taking control). I'm sure the api's will also be incompatible at a source level. All in all it's additional fragmentation.

That said, I am very aggravated how manufacturers/operators keep the platforms completely locked out. "Yes, MIDP can do that, but only if you can obtain the manufacturer's digital code signing certificates". On many handsets, it isn't even possible to access the full API on one's *own* device without such a certificate, not even for debugging. For instance on Nokia 40 handsets, the bluetooth RFCOMM API is "supported" but remains inaccessible to developers like myself. Meaning real developers have to resort to ugly hacks - such as opening communications channels through the file system.

So while fragmentation is evil, I hope that the additional competition forces the entire market to open up, because the status-quo is completely anti-innovation.

"Great phone, just don't know how a dev makes money if they're not also on Nokia and Samsung." ..... By Lisa Poundstone Posted Friday 14th March 2008 00:45 GMT

Lisa,

Maybe probably definitely Java needs to get ITs Act together and start Providing Lead DirectAXXXXIOn to ITs Customer Businesses. That would require them to Show what they can Deliver in Content 42 BStreamed. A Product which is Good Enough to Buy and Sell across all Markets would Interest them all.

It is also known as Shared Intelligence Leadership for Virtual Governance but that is an ESPecial Discipline in Virtualised Mode requiring ITs CodeXXXX Key Algorithms. However, it is all Inextricably Linked to the FreeWill Mindset of each Company Chief/OSDriver.

Google isn't objective!

Android may be the best thing since bread was first sliced. It may beat Apple and MS and Symbian. None of that matters. What does matter is how many handsets ship with it on, and whether this will be high enough to entice developers and other manufacturers to support it. The mobile industry has seen all this before, and huge firms have failed to dent the market share of Nokia, Sony and others. Why is Google different? Well, they look and sound different, but what they are offering is simply 'just another' flavouor of Linux, and a very green one at that. Don't count them out, but their hype is just hype and will remain so for at least a year.

Yes they have to allow me running background app's

@Mark Broadhurst

As long as you are downloading and installing the releases from Google and not some new flashier version from a dodgy Russian vendor you don't have much to worry about.

Linux works in the same way, and if you look through it's history for attempts by people to sneak backdoors/flaws into it's release tree you'll see their is very little success.

On the flipside, as you and any law abiding security company is not allowed to decompile a closed source phone OS how can you check to see if their are any backdoors/security holes (intentional or not)?

To risk an analogy, how have you secured your house. By putting a lock on the front door (That anyone can see "open") or by hiding the front door (And hoping it isn't found "closed").

A mobile phone needs interpreted code....

Phones like PCs now

A phone is essentially a little PC, so it is not surprising that we are seeing the beginnings of a mobile phone OS war. Obviously, Apple want to go down the same road as with their PCs and strictly limit what changes people can make to their software environment. Google want to create a system on which users can easily alter the software their phone uses, which makes sense. Only a fool would try to out-Apple Apple.

It will be interesting to see the outcome. At the moment there is no high spec, good OS PC equivalent to the Mac computer, but with no IBM-M$ monopoly in the mobile phone world the competition should be better. For a long time computer geeks have debated what would happen if we got a well funded, well marketed easy to use Linux OS for PCs - we are about to see this happen for the mobile phone world. You never know, this may be the first step to GoogleOS.

Symbian?

Am I missing something here?

So the promise of Android is that it's going to universal, the same on every phone. But they are also going to open-source it and let anyone who feel they can improve on it get to work. Won't this just mean a million and one incompatible Android distros?